New grant to enhance world's largest open computing network

August 31st, 2009 in Technology / Computer Sciences

A $30 million National Science Foundation grant will enable the University of Chicago to expand and extend until 2011 the operation of TeraGrid, a national system of interconnected supercomputers devoted to leading-edge scientific discovery and science and technology education.

Launched in 2001, TeraGrid provides access to extremely powerful supercomputers, connected via ultra-high-speed networks. As the world's largest computer storage and networking system for open scientific research, TeraGrid supports researchers and educators who need computational resources and services that would be difficult or impossible to obtain locally. Researchers currently can access more than 100 discipline-specific databases through TeraGrid.

The NSF grant recipients are Ian Foster, director of the Computation Institute, University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory; and John Towns, director of persistent infrastructure at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana, Ill. Matt Heinzel heads the Grid Interoperability Group that runs TeraGrid.

TeraGrid's resources are housed at the University of Chicago, Argonne and 10 other partner organizations nationwide, and are interconnected via a dedicated optical network. Most of these resources are devoted to a wide range of scientific and engineering research projects on global climate processes, earthquake hazard mitigation, stellar astronomy and other topics. But TeraGrid also supports an array of community outreach projects, raising awareness among future scientists about the power of computing.